Sunday, November 16, 2014

Airliner Tracking to Become Norm: Planes Would Report Position Every 15 Minutes Under Coming Global Standards

The Wall Street Journal
By Andy Pasztor

November 16, 2014 7:45 p.m. ET


Prompted by the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, government and aviation-industry officials are set to announce global standards calling for airliners to automatically report their position at least every 15 minutes, according to people familiar with the details.

In case of emergencies in which aircraft veer off anticipated flight paths, these people said, the same United Nations-backed group of experts wants authorities to be able to track the location of those planes at least once per minute. Taken together, the moves are intended to put in place the first truly universal, real-time tracking system for commercial aircraft operating over water, isolated polar regions or other areas lacking ground-based radar coverage.

Slated to be announced in early December, the findings and suggested one-year implementation deadline will be backed by various groups including the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the U.N., and the International Air Transport Association, the airline industry’s leading trade organization world-wide. Though technically nonbinding recommendations, the task force’s conclusions and list of suggested technologies to accomplish the goals are expected to be embraced around the globe and become de facto minimum requirements for practically all carriers.

The task force, however, has decided against calling for extra safeguards to protect against sabotage or deliberate acts to turn off communications hardware, said people familiar with the talks. The IATA-designated group of experts, they said, won’t push for immediate steps to make satellite-transmission systems or other communication equipment tamper-proof from anyone onboard, a step suggested by many safety experts.

Such protections would require wiring modifications and other potentially costly equipment changes, which task-force members concluded wouldn’t be justified because of the low likelihood that pilots or hijackers will seek to disable communications equipment in the future.

Many airlines previously embraced and invested in satellite links to provide such tracking coverage, including Air France after one of its widebody jets crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 and the wreckage wasn’t located for nearly two years. But for other carriers such as Malaysia Airlines—which opted against spending money on enhanced tracking capabilities before one of its Boeing 777s disappeared in March en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing—position reports were significantly less frequent. And there typically were no provisions for accelerated reporting during emergency situations.

There are more than 100,000 daily airline flights world-wide, but a significant percentage of them aren’t expected to be affected by the new standards because they fly only over areas with widespread radar coverage.

On Sunday, an IATA spokesman declined to comment.

In the past, universal tracking proposals have failed to gain traction because of industry inertia and cost concerns. But in announcing the initiative in April, IATA Chief Executive Tony Tyler highlighted how much the situation had changed as a result of public indignation. “In a world where our every move seems to be tracked,” he said, ”we cannot let another aircraft simply disappear.”

In October, Mr. Tyler acknowledged “the man in the street” was still “looking for a better answer” from the aviation industry.

Neither the wreckage of Malaysia Flight 370 nor any sign of the 239 people it was carrying have been found, though an intense, multination underwater search continues. An international team of investigators suspects deliberate acts disabled the jet’s air-traffic-control communications system and also turned off certain satellite-communication links before the plane dramatically veered off course, flew on for hours, ran out of fuel and eventually went down in a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean.

Flight 370 has become the biggest mystery in the modern jet era, industry officials argue, precisely because nothing similar has ever occurred and might never happen again for the foreseeable future.

IATA’s board of governors is expected to sign off on the report in early December, and announce plans for further study of tamper-proof arrangements. IATA also is expected to continue studying so-called emergency streaming of selected flight data off an airliner in the event massive system failures cause a serious incident or even a crash.

The routine tracking recommendations, as expected, target the least costly and time-consuming fixes. When it set up the task force in the spring, IATA said the group would concentrate on “a near term set of options” and “focus on existing equipage and procedures.”

But many air-safety experts have urged going further by championing the concept of tamper-proof communication systems this time, just as they unsuccessfully sought to make it impossible to turn off aircraft transponders in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks using jetliners. In 2001 as well as 2014, industry opposition prevailed based on arguments that estimated costs outweigh projected future risks.

For many airlines, enhanced global tracking requires primarily software changes and perhaps some additional fees to a service provider. But from the time IATA’s leaders created the task force—and even before all its members were in place—airline industry leaders signaled they were opposed to imposing substantial additional costs to make systems tamper-proof.

During a May interview, Kevin Hiatt, IATA’s senior vice president for safety and operations, stressed that those advocating tamper-proof solutions mistakenly might “try to do something that is not yet necessary.” Other prominent airline officials have said tamper-proof alternatives amount to fixes searching for a problem.

At the same time, pilot-union leaders have emphasized opposition to any changes that would strip cockpit crews from unfettered access to communications systems and the ability to pull circuit breakers to prevent the spread of possible in-flight fires.

Last week, Mr. Hiatt told an international safety conference in Abu Dhabi that “a consensus document” has been approved by the task force, and ICAO is expected to take it up at its high-level safety gathering next February. National regulators will assess mid- and long-term solutions.

But until short-term fixes are implemented, he said, “public trust and confidence is at risk when a large modern aircraft cannot be located.” Mr. Hiatt said the task force agreed that the automated updates will include position, altitude and direction. Airline officials can implement short-term changes in airline information-gathering and decision-making standards using internal capabilities, he added, “or you can do it externally; but you’re going to do it.”


- Source: http://online.wsj.com

No comments:

Post a Comment